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(PLEASE CLICK AHEAD ON ARROW OR IMAGE ABOVE TO SEE MORE WORKS FROM THIS EXHIBITION.)

Artist: Cliff Eyland
Title: Untitled (cellphone) from the series Cameras, Cellphones and Hard Drives, an exhibition at Gallery 1C03, University of Winnipeg, Canada, September/October 2006. Many thanks to Jennifer Gibson and Donna Jones for organizing this exhibition, and to Ian Lark for his poster design.
Date: 2006
Medium: acrylic, sea shell and glass vessel on gessoed MDF board.
5"x3" (12.7x7.6 cm)
Photo credit: William Eakin.
Notes:
Two years ago I showed what I called "Brick Paintings" at Leo Kamen Gallery in Toronto, many of which, in retrospect, look like cellphones. The emphasis in those works, however, was on the hand-held device as something that could be thrown like a paving stone over a barricade, or to send a message through glass.

I bought my first real cellphone a few years ago after I had already made imitation phones. Today I use my Treo 650 Palm not only as a telephone, but also as a still and video camera and to get email. It has a calendar, and I can type memos into it, and although I have yet to load it up with music, I could.

How often do people use cellphones to talk to themselves, I wonder? The non-working "cellphones" and "Personal Digital Assistants" I make in the studio can be used, but only for similarly private rituals. The "cameras" I make can be pointed at things, but there is no film in them, and my "hard drives" can be imagined to hold information even if they can't be plugged in to computers.

This exhibition comes with a soundtrack that I composed using the computer program Garage Band. This musical composition is meant to function as the audio for the art, something that one would usually listen to with headphones.

- Cliff Eyland, 2006
Click here to download Ian Lark's poster for this exhibition (140 KB PDF).

Click here to download the 2003 Brick Painting set publication (2.3 MB PDF).

Some related images of past works on this website that are not included in this exhibition:

A hand made Photoshop image of an imaginary 1975-era woman talking a photograph of herself (the image used for the poster of this exhibition).

A 1990s painting that has a painted-over hand-held calculator glued to it.

An image of a "book painting" painted on a solid piece of MDF in 1999.

An Illustrator image made during Eyland's 2001 New York residency of a naked man with a little man on his shoulder.

An Illustrator image made during Eyland's 2001 New York residency of a girl throwing a cellphone down a portable hole.

An Illustrator image made during Eyland's 2001 New York residency of two women, one of whom holds on to a tiny "cellphone figure."

An Illustrator image made during Eyland's 2001 New York residency of a "mouse."

An Illustrator image made during Eyland's 2001 New York residency of a woman talking into a hand puppet and to a tiny floating figure.

A painting of a girl talking to a doll.

A painting of Dr. Pam Perkins blowing smoke signals.

A painting of rain that looks like electrical wires.

A painting of two women using a dowsing rod to scare a tree trunk.

A painting of the artist's hand turned into a figure.

Another painting of the artist's hand turned into a figure.

A painting of the artist's fist turned into a figure.

A runner about to give a message to some anxious townsfolk.

The artist's left hand being formed in clouds.

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